British-American expat, author, political economist of the free market variety. Former classicist. Economic Freedom at @ceidotorg. Commanders and SAFC fan.
Washington, DC
Joined July 2008
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My new book, The Socialist Temptation, is out today! Get your copy at Amazon or all fine booksellers.
amazon.com/Socialist-Temptat…
Iain Murray retweeted
Can someone tell me how Moore is wrong?
What’s the difference between owning chip companies or critical mineral companies and, say, owning grocery stores?
Memo to the Trump administration: Stop buying companies.
A government $40 trillion in debt should be SELLING assets, not buying ownership stakes in 36 companies.
We thought government control of the means of production was what we were fighting against.
Iain Murray retweeted
Rory Kinnear's prime minister in Netflix's The Diplomat has resigned midway through the fourth series because Britain having the same leader for four years was deemed too unrealistic.
🔗: telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/10…
Iain Murray retweeted
“The nineteenth-century liberal regarded an extension of freedom as the most effective way to promote welfare and equality; the twentieth-century liberal regards welfare and equality as either prerequisites of or alternatives to freedom.”
— Milton Friedman
Looks like the days of any archaeology in Scotland are numbered...
🚨 EXCLUSIVE: Glasgow's Kelvingrove Museum has removed Egyptian mummies from display because there was no 'informed consent from the deceased individual'👇
mol.im/a/16227743
#Exclusive #Scotland #Glasgow #Museums #EgyptianMummies #Woke @MailOnlineScot
Iain Murray retweeted
Today, a New Mexico judge ordered Meta to pay a staggering $25 billion.
While most coverage has characterized it as a privacy case, the claims are fundamentally about speech, and 3 of the 5 categories of alleged misrepresentations have absolutely nothing to do with data privacy.
Instead, they are focused on “hateful, violent, and divisive content,” “misinformation,” and “equal application of Facebook’s policies.” Fraud is not protected by the First Amendment, but these are incredibly vague concepts without clear legal definitions that encompass a wide array of constitutionally protected speech. A jury was asked to interpret these terms and evaluate the accuracy of Facebook’s high-level statements about how it tries to moderate content against them.
To decide whether a statement like "we don't allow hate speech" was false, jurors had to apply their own understanding of terms that have no legal definition. Even more, they had to decide whether Facebook applied its policies equally. These are very amorphous concepts that mean something different to everyone, making it incredibly difficult to prove falsity, a necessary element in any fraud case.
Facebook was found to have committed 43,899,725 violations.
43,899,725.
How? The state multiplied the 26 statements Facebook made about its moderation practices by the number of users who may have potentially read them.
Many of these statements were not advertising. They were executives speaking publicly about how Facebook handles some of the most contested content moderation questions of the last decade.
The decision in this case would give government officials an incredibly powerful tool to go after content moderation decisions they don't like. Every state has a consumer protection law like New Mexico's Unfair Practices Act and every major platform publishes rules about what content it removes and how it enforces them. All a state has to do is point to an alleged discrepancy between a platform’s stated policy and its content moderation decision.
If it is not overturned, this case will have a massive chilling effect on what platforms say about their content moderation practices. The safest course of action for any platform now is to say as little as possible about how it moderates content to as few people as possible.
Ultimately, platforms will be less willing to share information with users and users will know less about the platforms they use.
Breaking News: Meta must pay $25 billion, one of the largest penalties levied against the tech giant, for deceiving users about data privacy. nyti.ms/4yvv5yZ
As someone once said, "Dance with the one who brung you." That goes as much for game design as for politics.
Iain Murray retweeted
1/2 @ISMurray is vice president for strategy and senior fellow at @CEIdotorg. He is also one of the founders of the @FreeConTalk project.
In a recent article for The Daily Economy, Murray wrote that America won’t outcompete China by restricting imports on robots. “It will win by becoming the best place in the world to build and deploy them.”
“It is a major part of the administration’s policy to ‘reshore’ American manufacturing to bring back jobs,” he explained, “and a tenet of the National Conservatism movement that America needs blue-collar jobs that pay a good wage. Yet both of these propositions rest on the idea that manufacturing needs to be labor-intensive.”
What neither officials in Washington nor NatCon influencers seem to understand is that the best chance for reshoring manufacturing capacity is to seek more automation of industrial processes, not less.
“That means more robots, but the administration has recently moved to restrict the import of robots, specifically humanoid robots from China,” Murray wrote. “The more hostile the administration is to automation, the more it will drive manufacturing back offshore.”
“Restricting access to robot hardware cannot be the answer. The sensible response is to make America the best place to invent, improve, and deploy robots in new and remarkable ways.” #FreeCon
Iain Murray retweeted
Ofcom Concedes Defeat in the 4chan Case
prestonbyrne.com/2026/10/20/…
Iain Murray retweeted
this California wealth tax thing is just incredible.
so in October 2025, a California healthcare union proposed a "one time" 5% tax on any billionaire's wealth. the ballot measure will be voted on next month. In early December 2025, California announced that it would be a retroactive tax if passed, applying to anyone with CA residency as of Jan 1, 2026. The objective is to pay for Medi-Cal, California's incredibly dysfunctional healthcare system. (which also functions as a glorified welfare apparatus, but that's a discussion for another time).
polls reveal that the CA electorate is split around 50/50 on the tax, but prediction markets only give Prop 40 a ~23% chance of passing (there are competing measures on the ballet that would nullify it).
there are 200 billionaires in CA, worth collectively somewhere between $2.3 and $2.6 trillion. 5% of that is around $100b, accounting for a small amount of attrition. proponents of the tax forecasted a significant windfall, assuming only a 10% departure rate.
supporters thought they were being clever with the retroactive concept. no billionares would leave CA in the few short months between the tax being proposed and the residency cutoff date, without the tax even having passed yet, right?
well as it turns out, they did.
a new paper [1] from two academics at Stanford called "The Net Present Value of the California Billionaire Tax Act", argues that not only did more billionaires leave due to the proposed tax than its proponents expected, but that the value of the tax, if it does pass, is actually negative.
proponents of the tax only assumed 10% avoidance, that is, only 10% of the taxable base of targeted billionaires would leave CA within the very short Oct-Dec 2025 window. Jaros and Rauh, the Stanford academics, find that a lower bound of 28.6% of the taxable base managed to leave.
just based on known departures, those departures total $577b in net worth, or $28.8b in potential tax lost. this of course does not capture everyone (many left without announcing their departure), so the authors normalize to departure rates estimated from other wealth tax events, and apply other discounts for litigation, arriving arrive at a figure of only $28-$36b in forecasted tax revenues.
but this isn't all! all of the income taxes paid by the departed billionaires are also forsaken. the authors estimate that CA billionaires pay $3.3- 5.8b in annual income taxes. they assume a midpoint of $2b lost in annual collections from departed billionaires. the net present value of that lost income stream is -$68.9 billion.
so when you add it all up you get:
+ $30b one-time tax windfall (estimated)
- $69b in present value of lost future income taxes
= - 38.9b overall net present value of the tax
of course, this analysis is highly estimate driven. the authors simulate the parameters 100k times and find a negative NPV of the implemented tax 85 percent of the time.
and if the tax doesn't pass, which it's not looking like it will, California still ended up losing at least $577b in departed net worth, and they have permanently poisoned the well with entrepreneurs who will now worry about future wealth taxes.
[1]: nber.org/system/files/workin…
Iain Murray retweeted
WAKE UP BABES NEW TARIFF LAWSUIT JUST DROPPED
libertyjusticecenter.org/cas…
Iain Murray retweeted
This is the future the UK wants for the entire Internet: only a handful of companies, ones that obey British censorship rules, may be permitted to survive.
The Online Safety Act has made hosting community forums so laborious that they're closing shop.
Hundreds of forums have shuttered due to piling paperwork and liability risks.
Ordinary speech from ordinary people, gone.
Read our report ⤵️
bigbrotherwatch.org.uk/campa…
Iain Murray retweeted
It’s pretty safe to say that when one has alienated the likes of Aaron Bastani, George Monbiot and Peter Tatchell (not to mention Caroline Lucas, & all the Green MPs elected in 2024), as the ‘Zionism is Racism’ has succeeded (sic) in doing, then one has lost the public debate:
Iain Murray retweeted
BREAKING NIUS: Für mich ist es einer der unglaublichste Auftritte von Bundeskanzler Friedrich Merz in dessen Amtszeit. Seit 17 Monaten erzählt Merz, er wolle Deutschland deregulieren, unnötige und schädliche Bürokratie beseitigen. Dann hat dieser Bundeskanzler die Möglichkeit, auf der Weltbühne, vor milliardenschweren Investoren dem Nvidia-Chef Jensen Huang eine Frage zu stellen. Und was fragt der Bundeskanzler? Er will wissen, wie man Künstliche Intelligenz am besten REGULIEREN kann. Als Huang antwortet, nunja, erstmal müsse die KI-Industrie in Deutschland aufblühen, bevor man sie regulieren könne, legt Merz nach. Er erklärt Huang, aus seiner Sicht sei entweder eine europäische oder gar eine globale Regulierung notwendig, um die "Schädlichkeit" von KI zu begrenzen.
Iain Murray retweeted
To put a 2020s twist on @JamesCarville's admonition, it’s the cost of living, stupid.
Workers see on their household budget line items and their paychecks that the president's economic strategy has made them worse off. As my colleagues @BenGlasner and @CardiffGarcia noted in an @InnovateEconomy analysis ten days ago, over the past year real wages have fallen for most workers across the pay ladder, including at the 90th percentile, the 10th percentile, and the median.
When workers are asked in our @EchelonInsights survey which party they think has the better approach for American workers’ interests, Democrats come out well ahead, 44 percent vs. 29 percent for Republicans, reflecting a net surge to the Democrats of 7 points from our 2024 survey.
Democrats have the advantage here among blue-collar workers (+11), white-collar workers (+14), and service workers (+16).
So much for the ballyhooed GOP working-class coalition.
wsj.com/opinion/trumps-tarif…
Iain Murray retweeted
Shoutout to everyone's favorite op-ed:
Oil traders are increasingly pricing the battle over the Strait of Hormuz as the new normal. Futures contracts for brent crude in December 2027 are now close to $90 a barrel, the highest ever and a sharp departure from even a month ago.
Iain Murray retweeted
Oh this story is delicious. Some choice parts for you:
The internet told them Europe was a social paradise. Turns out the trains are awful, the health care isn’t free, and people can be really mean. buff.ly/5cLtnha
Iain Murray retweeted
Another British #WarOnPrices
Judges determine a market rent. Judges also determine the wage of store staff relative to warehouse staff unless the company can prove the market rate is justified.
NUTS.
Property Tribunal judgment
Tenant challenges £50 rent increase for rent at £1,650 per month. Judgment decides that market rent is £1450.
assets.publishing.service.go…
Iain Murray retweeted
As so many of us warned, there is absolutely no incentive for people not to sign a rental contract/receive a rent rise then immediately challenge it. Meaning logjam in the courts and fewer people putting properties up for rent, damaging the rental market further.
